Tuesday 19 February 2008

This post will detail a method to initiate Maintenance Mode from an agent managed computer using a vbscript. This method is useful in the case where the people doing patching are not the same people who use the Operations Console and when you cannot dictate what is to be installed in the server. Clive Eastwood's AgentMM for example, if run remotely requires .NET 3.0, Operations Manager specific dll's, Admin permissions on OpsMgr and the ability to connect to the SDK service on the RMS.

Using this method, the person running the command needs to have absolutely no permissions on Ops Manager. All of the components required to have this function are part of a standard OS with and agent installed. It works through Gateways so can be used in firewalled or untrusted environments if you have a gateway in place.

There are 3 parts to this solution:

1) A VBScript on each managed computer that writes an event to the local event log.

2) A Management pack containing an rule that detects this event and runs a response on the RMS.

3) The response executes a Powershell script on the RMS that puts the server in to Maintenance Mode. I have borrowed pieces of the powershell script from Boris.

The vbscript is pretty simple and just writes an event to the event log that indicates the length of time Maintenance Mode should remain on. This time is passed as a parameter to the script.

Usage: MaintModeOn 4

- This command turns on Maintenance Mode for 4 hours

The single rule in the management pack picks up the event from the Application Log with event ID of 0, with a source of WSH and where the description contains the words "Maintenance Mode". In response, the rule runs the Powershell script MaintModeON.ps1 and passes to it two parameters -the name of the computer where the script was run and the event description.

The Powershell script puts all three pieces of an agent in the Maintenance Mode. This Powershell script should be copied to the System Center Operations Manager 2007 program folder on the root management server. If you have clustered the RMS it should be in the folder on both nodes.

---Update---

I have updated the links since google appears to have taken down the site hosting the files.

Monday 18 February 2008

A small expansion of Pete's MP Export for Disaster Recovery. Here is an Management Pack that exports all the unsealed MP's once a day to a folder. The folder name is the date of the backup. Backups older than 7 days will be deleted.